Various Artists - Biscione, Cara, Coggiola: Music for Dummies (Contemporary Chamber Music) (2020)

Introduzione e moto perpetuo for flute and piano – After a concert at the Conservatory of Trento, in May 2004, the newspaper L’Adige published a review titled “Going beyond postmodernity”. As regards the Introduzione e moto perpetuo, it stated: “In spite of its absolutely traditional language, rich in allusions and references to many figures of the twentieth century, [this piece], by virtue of its extremely balanced formal architecture, provided a moment of absolute aural delight, without falling into a pedantic Neoclassicism”. This is a beautiful sentence, which I would like to translate as follows: today, after everything and its contrary has already been done in music (“postmodernity”), we are now allowed to use any attitude whatsoever (including a certain Neoclassicism) in order to write good new music; by controlling most exactly the musical narrative (i.e. the architecture), it is possible to reach a delightful, rather than a trivial, result. After so many years, I would not be able to write, once more, a music as ultimately naïve as this; however, I am glad that this piece is now being made available on CD, because here I find a root that has not yet finished nourishing the plant I have become, for good or for bad.

Del 1850, for soprano and ensemble – In summer 2011, while I was on holiday on Lake Como, the deadline was approaching for a composition contest in which I had foolishly decided to take part; the contest aimed at celebrating the 150th anniversary of Italy’s unification. I did not feel like writing a simply encomiastic piece: the history of our country, along with some good things, appeared to me as being also punctuated by greater and lesser misdeeds. However, I saw the birth of our country as the (difficult) transition from adolescence to maturity, as that moment when dream, fantasy and hope are all still possible. Thus I remembered that Nonna Speranza (“Grandmother Hope”) was also the protagonist’s name in a famous poem by Gozzano; by re-reading this celebrated text, I realized that Gozzano’s Decadentism was perfect for describing my feelings about the Italian events. That poem, set at the end of the Risorgimento, cites almost all of the things which defined the Italian cultural identity, i.e. classical literature (Alfieri, Dante), the Settecento vocal music, and “Verdi… Giuseppe”, the greatest representative of Italian opera, whose family name was used as an acronym praising the first King of Italy, cited in turn in the poem as “the young King of Sardinia”. However, everything is immersed in the sad omen of a very long summer dusk – precisely as it was happening in my holiday: in the midst of the secrets between two seventeen-years-old girls, a tragic Goethean Romanticism surfaces (it is not by chance that Nonna Speranza’s friend is named Carlotta). After preparing the lyrics, through opportune cuts, my compositional work proceeded speedily, even though my holidays were sacrificed. I hope that your evaluation of this piece will be more generous than the jury’s, since Del 1850 failed to reach even the second stage of the competition.